In this 1999 broadcast of The Dini Petty Show, Lenny Kravitz sits down two weeks after winning his first Grammy for “Fly Away,” at the commercial peak of his fifth album, 5 — the record he played almost entirely himself, instrument by instrument. He arrives having only ever expected to be a studio musician, and says so: the plan was to be the person in the room making other people’s records, not the one on the cover.
What stays with you is not the music talk but the fatherhood. He describes his ten-year-old daughter Zoe as “quite musical” — already playing five or six instruments — and then jokes about the dad he can see himself becoming, out on the porch, polishing a shotgun. It is the loosest, funniest stretch of the hour, and it sits a few minutes away from the hardest.
The interview goes into his mixed Black and Jewish upbringing with a directness that daytime television rarely got. He talks about his mother, Roxie Roker of The Jeffersons, and about losing her; about the day both sides of the family sat Shiva; and about the afternoon a kid told him his dad was white. From there it opens back out — the Jackson 5 to the Met Opera, writing songs the way Mick Jagger does, and finally who he is actually writing for. The range of that stretch is the point: he moves from a childhood spent around a television set to the classical music he grew up hearing, and treats both as part of the same education.
Kravitz still fills arenas today, and television this unhurried, from the year everything turned for him, rarely surfaces. Unseen since it first aired, this master tape has been meticulously optimized and preserved via the official archive of The Dini Petty Show.
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